SOCIALISM and the
SERVILE STATE.
A DEBATE
BETWEEN MESSRS.
Hilaire Belloc
and
I Ramsay MacDonald,
MP.
THE SOUTH WEST LONDON FEDERATION
OF THE INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY.
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Socialism
"g
Servile State
A DEBATE
BETWEEN MESSRS.
HILAIRE BELLOC and
I
RAMSAY MacDONALD,
N.P.
THE SOUTH WEST LONDON FEDERATION
OF THE INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY*
19U
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IMPORTANT BOOKS
HILAIRE BELLOC and
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J.
The French Revolution
By HILAIRE BELLOC, M.A.
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Mr. Belloc's account of the French Revolution is » truly reniarkabl*
achievement in 'he space which it cccupies. and vifill arrest the reader at
once by the freshness of its standpoint and hy the lucidity with which its
ideas are expressed, and it will keep his attention throughout by the
admirable plau of exposition and eiclus'on of everythitifj that is not vital to
the storv. It is a marvellous piece of skilled condensation."
—Pull Mall
"
The
Oasette.
part of Mr. Belloc's book are the chapters on
Rosseau.*
The Characters of the Revolution," 'The Phases of the Revolution.' and
The Military /ispect of the Revolution.' In the second of these he gives
us a brilliant fiallery of lightning sketches of nine leading fitjures in the
Revolution, incidenially doing even-handed justice to characters so easy to
rage at as Robespierre and Marat."— Oaiiy New'i.
^
The
By
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'
Movement
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"It is the work of onu who vie
that IS as a tendency and not as rev
ism as v. tally related t'. the Social ir
attained by d process o: social re;
wi;h a Statesman's eyes;
.
of .one
who views
Social-
therefore destined to be
reconstruction (he leHisJjustment and reconstruc-
,1
1
lature beinj? the grrat workshop in
tion is to L.e carried into effect." /„.
—
ler.
" At a time when there seems much duubt as to the real meaning
and
application of Socialisri:. Mr. Rams iv VlacUonalds 'Socialist Movement'
will be- .vie jiiird bv 111 inl.frsof all i. .irr
o .rtifs. He siuveysihs whole
°^^''
nuic VTtur
,,ive come to be known as
al notes bii
=^'^
of the va ious influence*
'°3i
its grow h
...
... is written with
^
the fervour
of the a;,;u lU. diid no single conteniioii is jjui forward with the bombast of
the d<!Hiago(iue. as is proved ny his defitiilion
Socialism is a tendency and
not a revealed dogma.' "—Manchester City News.
i
.
1
11
"
"For of all English authorities Mr. MacDonald is best able to take
comprph'-isiv^ view of this mov-ment which bids to become the characfr....
wic '
He is learned in the
le
^.whilst it is comm-'ii
•|}9"'
it
his I'
iiimn daily contact with
,;e
proljli;ii-,
nil r ii:; ,!.; iiumar.Ui.'
Pioneer.
.
,
1
V:
.-.
:
—
WILLIAMS & NOHGATE,
14, Henrietta St.,
Covent Garden, London, W.C.
SOCIALISM and the
SERVILE STATE.
A DEBATE
BETWEEN MESSRS.
Hilaire Belloc
J.
and
Ramsay MacDonald, MP.
THE SOUTH WEST LONDON FEDERATION
OF THE INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY.
1911.
PRICE
-
TWOPENCE.
)
EXPLANATORY NOTE.
That the unreality of the
Collectivist ideal
from the fact that contemporary
Is
apparent
Collectivist effort is leading,
not to Collectivism, but to the Servile State.
The Debate on
Eeport
is
the above proposition, of which a Verbatim
here given, was held at the Memorial Hall, London,
May
E.G., on Friday,
5,
1911, under the auspices of the
South- West London Federation of the Independent Labour
Mr. Hilaire Belloc took the affirmative and Mr.
Party.
Ramsay MacDonald, M.P., the negative.
Mr. A. G.
Gardiner (Editor of the "Daily News") presided over an
J.
audience which packed the Hall
among
its
;
an audience which contained,
number, people of widely differing opinions about
the subject of Debate; an audience which, though
interested,
was a very orderly one indeed.
Neither of the
Disputants require any lengthy introduction
(1906-10) Liberal
man
of letters
;
M.P.
:
South Salford, and
for
Mr. MacDonald
is
a well-known
Mr. Belloc was
is
a prominent
member
I.L.P., has been Secretary to the Labour Party since
ception,
and
Group.
I
is
the present Chairman of
keenly
its
of the
its in-
Parliamentary
have only to add that this Report has been approved
by both gentlemen.
H.M.
May, 1911.
(Copies of tJiis /Report nitty }>c obtained, direct, from
Morrison, '51, Sidney Road, Sfor/nvell, S.W.; The
National Labour Press, .30, lilackfriars Street, Manchester, and
23, Bride Lane, London, B.C.; or through any /bookseller.
Single copies, by post, 2\d ; irholesale terms oti aj)])lirafion.
Ilerhcrt
.
—
VERBATIM REPORT.
CHAlltMAN
Ladies and pontlemen, ue arc met todebate in the world. When
I am be<;iiniiug- a little
the first man looked out at Creation
far back, but you need not feel concerned on that account
when the first man looked out on Creation there was one
subject that probably filled his mind. That subject was the
Mystery of the Universe in which he found himself placed.
He saw the glorj' of the sun by day and the mystery of the
stars by night, he saw the pag'eant of the seasons pass before
him, he heard the voice of the thunder-cloud, and saw the
sword of the lightning- stab the earth, and in the presence
of all this splendid spectacle he fashioned his thoughts of
God and the omnipotent powers that encompassed him.
But when he ceased to dwell alone, he found other things to
talk about.
He began to discuss his fellowman. He begai\
in a word, a debate on Socialism, and he has been debating
it ever since, and he will go on debating it, T fancy, until
the last two men, who will probably be a Jew and a Chinaman,
sit over the embers of the last fire to catch the latest breath
of the expiring atmosphere.
For the subject is eternal and
inexhaustible.
It is at the foundation of the whole history
The
night
of
:
to hear, I suppose, the oldest
human
society.
The history
—
of society
is,
in the first place,
an attempt to discover how we may live decently and comfortably with our fellowmen.
We are told to go and learn
of the ant.
I believe the ants and the bees have solved the
problem. They have solved it on a strictly Socialist and Collectivist basis.
They recognise nothing and they have nothing
but a collective conscience, and any individualist who turned
up among them would suffer a very short shrift.
Anyone
who knows, who is familiar with, a hiA^e will be familiar
with those scenes when the workers bundle the drones
out on the ground beneath and leave them to crawl
about and starve.
There is a moral, no doubt, in that,
even for human society, but after all men are not ants
and bees. They are not instinctive and automatic Socialists
The first and foremost fact about man is
or Collectivists.
that he is an ir.dividual, with personal aims and thoughts,
and purposes and passions and appetites.
He insists 0!i individual liberty. He is, in fact, a solitary individual whose ultijiate fastness is never really penetrated by his fellovi's. Even in
nis punishments he is alone. "The sins ye do by two and two are
Mr.
4
BELLOC
paid for one by one." Well, lliat bein<>' so, he is therefore clearly
dift'erentiated from our friends the ants, but at the same time,
so ridiculous a creature is he, that while Individualist to bej^in
He is gregariwith, he insists on becoming a social animal.
ous in his habits and interdependent in his nature, and that
being so it becomes necessary for him to subordinate his personal aims and his individual will in a very large degree and
in a multitude of aspects to the general necessities and the
There's
common interests of the society in which he lives.
There is the cause of that eternal conflict which
the rub.
has been waged in ail countries and in all ages and will go
on being waged until we cease to be. Well now, into this
I
great argument it is fortunately not my duty to enter.
am here simply as a sort of Buifer State between the belligerents.
I keep the
I am a friend of both the Montagues and Capulets.
ring and take care that there are no illegitimate blows struck,
and that the victory goes to whomsoever it goes as the
Neither of tlie combatants
result of an honourable combat.
They are
needs any introduction to any English audience.
known wherever our language is spoken as among the leading
Just one
and foremost figures intellectually of our time.
Mr. Belloc will ojjen
word I may say as to the procedure.
by speaking to the motion which is in his name, and he will
Then Mr. MacDonald will reply for
speak for half-an-hour.
halt-an-hour.
Mr. Belloc will have a further twenty minutes, Mr. MacDonald a further twenty minutes; and finally,
I now call upon Mr. Belloc
there will be ten minutes each.
to open.
—
—
Mr.
BELLOC
:
I
am
going to ask you, Mr. Chairman, and
ladies and gentlemen, with an insufficient voice, to follow so
and I am sure so far as Mr. MacDonald
far as I am concerned
a certain process of
is concerned, for he is a Scotchman
reasoning, and I am going to beg you I have no need to
beg him to permit the discussion to follow those particular
I am sorry for this,
lines which follow from its definition.
I am not here to
for this is to give pain and not pleasure.
I am not here to-night
argue against the Collect ivist theory.
to say that I think it is of this or of that general good or evil
nature.
I am liere to defend a particular and positive thesis,
1 want
and Mr. MacDonald is here to destroy that thesis.
you to note it very clearly at the beginning of the discussion,
not only because that thesis is the object, the material, of
what we are dealing with to-night in this particular debate,
but because it is, in my opinion at least, by far the most practical matter, by far (1 prefer to say) the most immediate and
—
—
—
—
Mr.
BELLOC.
5
I
matter in the politics of Western Europe, to-day.
maintain that the eitort of Collect ivist idealism and of Col-
real
lectivist speakers, writers, and thinkers, is havinfj iis its
result, not as its object, with the material with which it disposes to wit, human nature, and es])ecially Western European
human nature not the establishment of the Collectivist or
Socialist State, nor an approach thereto, but the establishment
And I shall begin by
of what I shall call the Servile State.
defining
terms when I use the words the Servile State.
though it is not necessary to
definiI take it that man
thought I take
tion it is necessary to an explanation of
it that man demands in the economic sphere two things,
which I will call vSutficiency and Security.
Let no one pretend that those things need a strict and absolute definition.
But each of us, by examining himself, knows at once that not
where property is concerned, or the sense of property, but
where mere consumption is concerned, we all of us I'eel a
necessity, a craving, for enough and the continuance of
enough.
I have never met a man, I won't say who said, but
I have never met a man who felt, that he wanted economic
equality.
I don't want it, and 1 don't think there is anybody
in this room who wants it.
—
—
my
—
my
my
:
One
in
the Audience
:
Oh
—
!
Mr. Belloc No, economic equality, no. I don't believe
there is anyone in this room who says: "I am comfortable; I have all I need; it will continue as long
as I live, and my children shall have it after me that
five hundred a year
is,
but how enviously I hate that
man with a thousand a year!" That attitude of mind does not
exist.
That is not a human type. We do not feel thus about
economic things, but we do feel to the marrow of our bones
the desire for Sufficiency and Security. To say that we desire
an absolute sufficiency is nonsense. You cannot define suffi:
—
—
ciency.
It is a certain minimum differing, I won't saj with
individuals, but certainly with traditions: and where the
society is unhappily split, as English society is unhappily
split, into various strata of dift'ering traditions, you will find
that within each stratum that feeling for the minimum is so
strong that men brought up to a certain minimum, which is
often far too much for any man really to want, will run the most
terrible risks in order to obtain it for themselves and their
children. As for security, every man born knows how strong the
appetite for that is. Whether it be the thousand a year that a
man is getting as Editor of a great newspaper of a Socialist
tendency, or the hundred a year that a man is getting as a
—
Mr BELLOC.
6
fairly skilled artisan, or the fourteen shillings a week which
man is getting as an agricultural labourer, once his standard
is established, once his children are at least fed, clothed,
the
housed 'his domestic hearth founded on that basis
security of it is essential to him and is perhaps the strongest
craving he has. Very well. To establish a minimum security
and a minimum sufficiency (you cannot get them absolute, and
I do not i)retend to define them) to meet in a substantial and
sufficient way these two cravings is the work of any sane body
it fails on the economic
of men in the economic sphere.
it is absent, the body politic
side the body politic is sick.
may be near its death and is certainly in a high fever. It is
absent in England to-day. It is absent in North Germany, it is
absent, especially in the original Puritan States of the United
States, and there are patches of the cancer in France and in Italy,
a few in Spain, and onlj' one, I am glad to say, thank God, in
Ireland.
For this disease which I may add, in passing,
affec'ts that part of the Lowlands between the Grampians and
the high, deserted places of the Border for this disease a
remedy has been proposed to which a number of those now
listening to me are attached, and to which Mr. MacDonald
is attached.
It is Collectivism.
You say, and you are right
in saying, that a phenomenon accompanying the insecurity and
the insufficiency which the mass of men in industrial society
feel to-day, and a phenomenon that is the proximate cause
if not tlie ultimate cause of it, is the possession of the means
of production by a minority.
I have heard it denied, but I
have never heard it denied by anybody who counted. I have
heard it denied, but I have only heard it denied by the kind
of people whose denial is a little help to any cause which
they oppose not a great help but a little help. And you propose I say you; I am not addressing the audience at large;
I never insult a large number of people, even when they are
without weapons but you that are Collectivists propose to
settle this business by tlie putting of the means of production
into the hands of the politicians, or, as you say, the community.
The community is an abstraction the politician is a reality,
but no matter. I fully recognise this, that were you to do so
a
—
—
When
When
—
—
—
—
—
;
Those of you who enjoy the
your intelligence I am not insulting you
will appreciate that there are other ideal, possible, hypothetical solutions.
You may say that only yours is the practical one and the only one exactly consonant to the nature of
the problem would be solved.
full possession of
—
You may say that millions of men naturally come together so easily, and so directly express their general view,
that politicians will always obey tliem, even in detail. Perhaps
man.
Mr. BELLOC.
7
I should agree, or perhaps not, but you cannot deny the mere
One of those is the
theory that there are other solutions.
solution which has been attempted by the whole luiman race
with the exception of those who have accepted the institution
of slavery. The other is the solution which has been adopted
by the whole human race where it has accepted the institution
The first solution is the seeing to it that a deterof slavery.
mining mass I suppose in the ideal case every member that
at any rate the determining mass of society shall be possessed
as individuals, or as corporations, regarded as free agents within
That was the ideal of the
the State, of the means of production.
Middle Ages, and that is to-day the ideal, for instance, of China
and of India. Another way of doing it and it is that which I
want to define is the Servile State. You recognise, or if necessary you impose., a state of society in which the mass of your inhabitants I won't say your citizens are permanently disYou dift'erentiate the
possessed of the means of production.
community into two classes, those who possess the means of
But you get security
production and those who do not.
—
—
—
—
—
—
and suflBciency for all by organisation. You see to it, if you are
humane, that the man who is not in possession of the means of
production shall not be oppressed and that the punishments
that will compel him to work are moderate and not excessive.
You see to it that he lives the life which happens to suit your
minimum of human comfort, but
of production into his hands, directly
or indirectly.
He is a slave. Whether you use the word or
whether you do not, that acceptation of one class
permanently in possession of the means of production,
and another side by side with it permanently dispossessed of the same, is what makes the Servile State, and
that is what makes the slave class. And the other people, who
own the means of production, you conversely, by the very act
of creating a slave class, confirm in their possession of the
means of production. You make them stronger in their citadel
than before
you may prevent their being cruel you may
prevent everything which you do not like on the fringes
of their action, but you do not take away their capital,
I hope I have
and you do not take away their land.
By
definition, if you
defined the vServile State clearly.
should wake up to-morrow to find that all those millions of
English men and women who possess no land or capital and
who work at a weekly wage were confirmed in that wage for
ever, and tlieir children after thera were looked after when in
school, were looked after in old age. b\it never allowed to get
capital or land, while, on the other hand the class that have it
own
particular ideal of the
you do not put the means
;
;
my
—
Mr.
8
BELLOC
shall remain having it, you wonld wake up to find England not
Many
a Socialist State at all but a Servile State. Is that clear
people love that ideal. I do not say I dislike it. I have seen slaves
life, and a greater man, if I may say so without egotism,
in
I hope he did not
Aristotle, was at the pains of remarking
r'
my
mean
—
— something which the Catholic Church has
her dogmas — that certain men are born slaves.
denied
I do
with
not say the Servile State is a bad thing, but at any rate
I was going to say it is not the
it is not Collectivism.
S.D.F., but at any rate it is not Collectivism or Socialism.
You are out you who are Socialists are out for a particular
object, and I bear you this testimony, not as an opponent, but
as a great sympathiser with all that is in your work parallel
to the movement of democracy for the last himdred years; you
not only fight for what is true, but you are capable of defendit
—
—
ir -^
what you
believe,
and you desire
—
to Collectivise, to Social-
put into public hands the hands of the politicians,
If you do not do that, you
that is the means of production.
fail, and the more you stereotype the state of society in which
the community does not own the means of production, the more
you have failed. The further you go from it, the further have
you failed in Socialism. Yery well. My next point, in the
Out of the Servile
fourteen minutes tliat remain, is this.
There is no record of a Western European
State we came.
society which until the birth of that Personality which, by a
private idiosyncrasy, 1 shall call Our Lord, was not upon a
please
basis of servility, and I am not using the word servile
remember this in any bad sense. As Mr. MacDouald is a
Scotchman, and therefore a clear thinker, I know he won't
It may be a very good thing to be a
accuse me of that.
slave or to have slaves, or a slave class, or (by a prettier term)
a servile class, just as it may be a nicer thing to have "labour
colonies" than penal settlements for such of the proletariat
However. In what we
as won't work for the capitalist.
people like me call, in our vulgar nomenclature, changed by
the hypnosis of our reltgioD, in what we call Pagan times. Western Europe reposed upon the servile basis. That was not only
true of the civilised but also of the barbarian people. They could
not think in other terms, just as Lloyd George cannot think
They had to think of em])loyer and employed as
in other terms.
being two different classes. They had to think of the freeman
There fell
and the slave as distinct portions of the community.
upon that way of organising the economic business and that way
for those cravings were the
of securing sufficiency and security
human driving forces that produced slavery a certain influence which I shall not be at length to define, for I am not
ibv.^
to
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
;
Mr. BELf.OC.
»
here to talk history at any
the object
Catholic Church, the slave disappeared, and the disappearance of the
servile class between, let us say, 600 to TOO and 1 ,'iOO and
1,400 in that slow process of seven or eight hundr(Ml years
is the big economic phenomenon of Western Europe.
At the
end of it the mass of Western European men, the determining
mass of families, owned capital and land.
It may be a bad
thing for the man to own the house in which he lives, the soil
which he tills, the instrument with w^hich he works, either
individually or co-operatively, in a guild, but anyhow fre
from the domination of his central government.
Maybe k
was bad to have men thus economically free bad or good that
society existed.
And it broke down. It did not break down
before
but
a revolution
in
morals and in theology,
after a revolution in morals and in theology, and as
a consequence of the revolution in morals and in theology.
And after four liundred years of entertaining
experiments, each of which has been more painful than the
last, you are now arrived at a state of society whicli, in
those countries which have abandoned tradition, you very well
know cannot endure. I want to tell you people who think any
province of Europe, even one so warped, can be transformed
into a Collectivist society that as a matter of fact, when you
deal with the material to your hand it turns all your efforts
and you transmute it (against your will) not into the Collectivist State, but into the Servile State.
That is my point.
Now what is the importance of that P If I were a Colonial,
I should say that it had an importance from the point of
view of Pragmatism, but being a civilised European I do not
use terms of that sort.
It is not of importance from the point
of view of Pragmatism, because Pragmatism is bosh
it
is a term used by people who do not use the grey matter of
their brains, who do not "grip."
The fact that you cannot
and are not producing the Collectivist State has the importance which we all of us discover in any action of ours
when we deal with the real universe. If, having learned too
much or too little mathematics, but never having been to
London, I say the straightest line from this hall here to St.
Pancras, though it runs through a large number of houses is,
in time, the shortest way to get there, experience will prove
me to be wrong. If I pretend, as many young men do, that
man is an absolute sort of being and that, let us say,
ladies who have no votes have no power in the State, life will
prove me to be wrong. If I pretend that good living, good
eating, good drinking, heavy sleeping, happy holidays will
lesson of
all politics.
lenfj:th,
Under
thouprh history
is
this influence, that of the
—
—
:
——
Mr
10
HELLOC.
make me happy at fifty, life will prove me to be wrong. That
does not mean that logical deduction is a mistake, but that
there is a veiy large number of first principles in the universe
and that only God if you will allow me to use the term
That is the opposite
is capable of comprehending them all.
—
of
Pragmatism, because Pragmatism depends upon a plural-
istic
universe.
now wish you to turn to this phenomenon, and I purposely put it at the end of this first section of the debate that
You
I may gel matter for replying to from Mr. MacDonald.
have laboriously built up, in books, in journalism, and in some,
they're none of them worth
at least, of the Parliaments
I
—
—of Western
And at
Europe a Socialist propaganda.
what have you arrived by it? You have municipal enterprise.
You have it only by borrowing from the capitalist.
You have never confiscated you have never dared to conYou borrow from
fiscate; you have never tried to confiscate.
the capitalist, and you offer the capitalist interest upon his
capital, whether the enterprise pays or whether it does not. You
much
;
point to those enterprises, with their sinking funds of course,
but you have in Western Europe as a whole, this. When you
began all this wonderful work, the cajjitalist had not got his
grip to any large extent upon the municipalities and corporate
To-daj' you are earning
life of the towns of Western Europe.
according to statistics you can play with them, but roughly
it is this
you are earning 1.8 per cent, and you are paying
3.2 per cent.
You do not only borrow tramcars, copper
wires and granite setts for tramways which pay, you also
borrow very largely for experiments that do not pay, for
wash-houses that hardly pay, for libraries that are not intended to pay
you borrow bricks, mortar, tiles, glass, at
interest, although these things do not breed.
There has been
no advance towards that prime action, that virile thing,
without w^iich Socialism is worthless confiscation.
And not
only have you not begun it, but you are going further and further away from it.
Last night, in the House of Commons,
there was brought in a Bill which is roughly to this
effect,
and I believe it is accepted by what is called
"all parties" (which always means a tiny minority of the
English people), you are going by this Bill to put for the purposes of insurance against the accidents of modern capitalism
in other words, for establishing security to the capitalist
on his side aud the yjroletarian on his £9,200,000 of taxation
per year on the shoulders of the working classes. You are going
to put a somewhat smaller taxation upon the shoulders of
the employing classes: and what is called the State, that is,
—
;
—
;
—
—
Mr. BELLOC.
11
every man who drinks a glass of beer or cup of tea, or smokes
a pipe of tobacco, is goin;^ to provide something more.
There are individuals who would resist that kind of
thing, but you Socialists will accept it, and you will be
You
by that step further from the ideal of Collectivism,
It is not my ideal.
cannot but be further from it.
I
am not here to-night defending it or opposing it. You know
very well that personally I am opposed to it, but at any rate
my argument stands, that if your ideal were consonant to the
nature of man, and if this putting of the means of production
into the hands of the politicians were a normal, a safe, solution of the problem, as contrasted with
though I am not
introducing that to-night; that is a side issue, but it is perhaps the main issue of all as contrasted with the proper distribution of the means of production in ownership, co-operative
and private, throughout the people; then that CoUectivist
ideal fails in this, that when you begin to legislate and
try to apply it to men, your instruments slip oif their
material.
The tool slips oS the metal.
Your theory is
not chosen with a knowledge of the stuff with which it
has to deal, and human nature, in all its little ways and
instincts, pushes you oif into something other and M'orse than
you intended. Catch my argument well before I sit down. I
have still exactly a minute.
My argument is this. All your
reforms which touch the proletariat in industrial society
tend, not to a CoUectivist State at all, but to a Servile State;
that is, to a State in which the mass not to-day possessed,
and increasingly for the last four hundred years dispossessed,
in industrial Europe, of the means of production shall be confirmed in sufficiency and security, in having enoiigh and in
being sure of having enough; but shall not advance at all towards the possession, collectively or individually, of the means
—
—
my
That is
point.
And I add as corollary
of production.
to that plain fact which all can see before them that this
fact is a proof that your theory which demands the Collectivising or Socialising of the means of production is as a
workable and human thing untrue.
It does not work
with the stuff of humanity.
Very well.
That is
thesis, and I want Mr. MacDonald in his reply,
only
for
sake and the sake of the audience, to avoid three
things,
I do not want him to say it is an aid to Collectivism
to create a servile class, because it is not.
you make
a very large number of people, millions of people, comfortable
you are not making people who will rebel against capitalists.'
Secondly, I hope he won't say because it will give me a lot of
trouble for nothing that these movements toM'ards the Servile
my
my
When
—
—
*
Mr.
12
MacDONALD.
State arc not tlieie, because they are. If he says in his reply that
they are not, Ihen in my reply I shall briii^^ a certain number
of things which 1 tliink will startle him, not only from this
Thirdly, I
country but from Germany and from France.
do not want him to say that the Servile State actually is the
Collectivist State, because it isn't.
Mr. RAMSAY MacDONALD Mr. Chairman and friends, it
always a g-reat pleasure to meet my friend Belloc, whether
He has been genial, he has been
it is at dinner or in debate.
facetious, he has been original, he has been obscure, but neverthe less I think he has committed a sufficient amount of indiscretions an(i promulgated a sufficient number of errors to
give me an opportunity of asking you to listen to me for
half-an-hour.
He had, as you will have noticed, a glimmering
whether it was rational or conscientious 1 do not quite
idea
know before he sat down as to what lines my reply was to
go upon, and like an old and well-trained soldier he took
the precaution to tell me that if I replied as I ought to reply
he would consider it was no reply at all. Well, Belloc and
I are old friends, and I will draw upon that friendship to
We are
tell him that I am going to reply in my own way.
told that we do not mean to land you in the Servile State.
We say the opposite. We believe the opposite, but as a
matter of fact, says Mr. Belloc, you are going into the Servile State.
He just reminds me of a man looking over George
•Bernard Shaw's shoulder when he is writing one of his immortal plays, and without having read the play from the
beginning, and without having seen the magnificent ending
of the play, he says " Bless me, what is the man scrawling
I see a few irregular things"
about ? There is no play there.
and those of us who have had correspondence with Shaw know
the very irregular and undecipherable things that look like
" I see a few irregular things, but it is no play at all."
letters
Of course, the reply that Shaw would immediately make to
this man, and the reply thai I make to Belloc, is that you
never can judge what is happening if you take a process of
evolution at any given moment and say " I am just going to
You evolve
study it there." You should begin away back.
But, says Mr. Belloc, if my opponent urges
towards an end.
that argument I am going to say that is not argument, and I
am going to insist upon my opponent drawing a little line
here and there, and confining the whole of his argument and
T su})mit
attention within this narrow and incomplete field.
to Mr. Belloc that if he seriously means to stand by that argument he gives a ver>' good reason why he has been usin?? the
:
is
—
—
—
Mr.
MacDONALD.
13
expression Servile State to-night so frequently, with, I subNow what does he say? He began
mit, so little meaninj^.
quite truly by stating that nobody ever suggested that Social-
Then
That is perfectly true.
ism meant economic equality.
He says what we want is
he made another true statement.
sufficiency, which he says is one thing to one man and another
That is perfectly true, because
thing to another man.
But
sufficiency is not economic at all, but psychological.
psychological sufficiency must always have an economic basis
Then, after
or an economic medium for expressing itself.
having laid down that truth, he departed upon a very characteristic Bellockian error, by saying that this sufficiency, was
equivalent to a demand that each, one and all, severally and
separately, should own his own means of production.
Mr. Belloc No.
Mr. MacDonald But that is the only argument. That
is one of the sticks I have handed over to you to beat my
back with when your twenty minutes come.
We will see
That is the only meaning that I can attach to
about that.
it, but if Mr. Belloc rejects that interpretation then I will
begin with his own argument.
You want a sufficiency.
that is common ground.
Precisely
I agree
How are you
going to get it? You cannot possibly get it by each of you
owning your own acre of land, your own house, you own bit
of Armstrong, Whitworth & Company's machinery, your own
Member of Parliament, your own Editor, your own newspaper,
and your own constituency.
You cannot do it. You might
have done it in those delightful primitive days in which my
friend Belloc's mind has taken up what, I am sorry to say,
seems to be a sort of permanent abode and habitation, but a
man of modern mind, modern tendencies, and modern rationality cannot possibly take up that position.
What happened
in those deplorable days when there was a revolution in mind
and in morals I think that is Belloc's expression; it not, he
will correct me in those twenty minutes
what happened in
those days when the revolution in mind and in morals started?
You emerged not merely from one moral point of view to
another, and from one religious form of organisation and belief to another, you also emerged from one economic organisation, one form of economic and industrial organisation, to
another, and the one that you went into was one which was
characterised by a great mass of capital being used as an
economic unity by a great mass of men co-ordinated.
Mr. Belloc No.
Mr. MacDonald Yes, co-ordinated into a social unit, and
whilst your production was co-operative and communal, your
:
:
;
;
—
—
.
:
:
,
.
Mr MacDONALD.
14
was individualistic on the old-fashioned medireval
this.
You did not have a complete revolution in mind and in morals and in society.
You
had a piecemeal revolution. You solved the problem of production in a modern way, but you failed to apply your modern
minds and circumstances to the problem of distribution. What
distribution
lines.
What happened was
does the Socialist sayP The Socialist says there is no use talking about individualism and production again. When you talk
of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, that does not mean that you are dividing
it all up into so many parcels and then handing it out over a
post.-office counter as you get your old age pensions now.
Nothing of the kind. It means that you keep it co-ordinated,
organised, working co-operatively, and that that thing which
Mr. Belloc thinks is an abstraction when it does not mean
merely a politician, the community, should own that, control
it, and see that it is used for the benefit of tlie separate individual who is using it as a co-operating factor. That is the
And why use in connection with that State
Socialist State.
the expression Politician? Is it to enlighten you or to mislead you?
Is it an accurate description or a prejudiced description ?
I venture to say that it is used to mislead you, and
Because why a politician?
that it is a prejudiced description.
I am certain that my friend Belloc knows as well as I do that
the Socialist State is not going to be only a political State;
that is the mistake that ignorant people like Mr. Mallock
make, not learned people like Mr. JJelloc make. The Socialist
State is a State whicli is not merely political, as the modern
It
It is rapidly becoming something else.
State mainly is.
is a State which I at any rate think must always be political
but which must also be industrial, and you are going to have
the two organisations, tlie two absolutely different types of
organisation, the Industrial vState and the Political State, not
existing side by side, because tliat is a false analogy, but
interfused one into another, the one impregnating tlie other,
so to sj)eak, the two blended together to make a genuine
Democratic State democratic on its jjolitical side, denuxratic
on its industrial side owning those forms of capital in the
use and abuse of which the whole community is more intorested
than any private individual, and then establislting a s\'stem
of distribution which will enable tlie co-operating producer to
consume as a self-regarding and self-contained moral and
Now you cannot bring that about, and
rational individual.
you cannot have a clear conception of how it is going to be
broTight about, unless yo\ir mind refuses to go upon ])olitical
histead of the politician
lines and goes uj)on industrial lines,
—
—
Mr.
MacDONALI)
15
which Mr. Belloc has asked j'ou to think about and to concentrate your attention upon, think of the manager of a
The blending of Parliament
successful co-operative business.
and the Co-operative Union of Manchester must take jilace.
Mr. Belloc Heaven help us
Mr. MacDoxald I knew that that oxjiression was coniiu'^-.
He says "Heaven help us." Well, I think we have not (]uile
I think we can help ourselves, quite a])art
come to that j'et.
from Heaven, and my reason for saying that is this, that an
!
:
:
way.
man
like Belloc knows all the difficulties in the
If we were going blindly on, thinking
present political condition was the best we could
intelligent
That
that our
is
why.
devise, going blindly on thinking the Co-operative CTnion w^as
the best that could be devised, then Belloc 's pessimistic interjection would be perfectly justifiable.
lUit as we see clearly
how we are going to amend both, and as there is a vast amount
of experience accumulating which will enable us to amend
both, and as we are beginning as a matter of actual fact, experiments to amend both, then we have not come yet to the
pessimistic exclamation of "Heaven help us."
are helping ourselves, and we are evolving that state of society under
which the industrial idea of co-operation and the political idea
of representative government can be blended and used for
both political and industrial purposes.
That is not the Servile State.
The Servile State is a State which depends, not
upon production at all, but upon consumption.
Servility does
not depend upon a system under which a man produces, unless
his personal liberty happjens to be sacrificed to the production,
and his personal liberty even then m\ist always be limited by
his social personality and not by his more eccentric and individualistic personality.
Keeping these things in mind, we
then have got to reply to the Servile State idea that under
Socialism, whilst the means of production may be held in common, the means of consumption will be held individually, and
the man who defines that State as the Servile State is only
abusing the English language.
That is
State.
The final
point that I have got here, when I was asked to reply to certain
things so that the coming twenty minutes might be filled up,
is this.
Says Mr. Belloc, we have never confiscated anything
yet, and therefore we are no good.
Well, we have confiscated
a good many things. I will tell you what we have confiscated.
have confiscated a shilling in the £ of Belloc' s income.
And if he's fortunate enough to have any of his income
invested in the Funds, we have confiscated a little bit
more.
If he is fortunate enough, from an econo'.'nic point
'if view, to own building land round abo d London,
we iiave
We
my
We
—
Mr.
16
confiscated
more
income of
fifteen
MacDONALD.
If he is fortunate enough to have an
thousand a year we have confiscated still
more.
I congratulate my friend that from his economic resources he can shake that mournful head of his so as to indir
But, he
cate that he has been touched on all these points.
says, when you do all your work, all your public work, your
municipal trams, and so on, you only do it on borrowed capiHow long does borrowed capital exist? It
tal.
Precisely.
does not exist more than twenty years at the very outside.
His argument is not quite sound, but I am not going to go
into details.
I am going to assume it, which after all is the
best way to deal with it.
I am going to assume that his
Even if we borrow for the purpose of
argument is sound.
building our schools with bricks and mortar, what happens?
The ground is ours when the loans are paid olf the bricks and
mortar are ours when the loans are paid oft' and if we go
on sufficiently long mark you, I am not using this as my
argument, but only showing that his argument is unsound
if we go on sufficiently long the process of borrowing is a
terminable process, and the weight of the borrowed money
is a constantly diminishing weight, until even on that line,
if we adopt it, an intelligent statesman will at last bring
you to Socialism and clear the borrowing out altogether.
Realh", from the point of view of the debate, I am prepared
I believe I still have a quarter of
to leave it there.
an hour, but so far as the real points were concerned,
and so far as the attack upon Socialism was concerned,
I want to know, howI think I have made my reply.
He talks
ever, what Belloc exactly has got in his mind.
What does he mean by the Servile
about the Servile State.
He says the
State? He said he defined it, but he did not.
Servile State is a State under which the means of production
are not held by the people, but that is not the Servile State.
Will he
I might claim that that is the CoUectivist State.
tell me what is the difference between that CoUectivist State
and the Servile State ?
Mr. Belloc Oh yes.
Mr. MacDoxald Then he tells us that he goes back to the
Middle Ages, to the days of the Guilds and so on. A\'ill he
tell U3 how it is possible under modern conditions, with factories and factorj' i)roduction and large cai)iialism, to go back
Will he
to the conditions under which tlic (iuilds tiourislied r
tell me exactly what idea of production he has got, what idea
of capitalism he has got, and what idea of Socialist organisaWill he tell me how he is going to build that
tion he has got?
up, how he is going to move into that from the present state of
still.
;
—
:
:
;
—
Mr.
BELLOC.
17
If he is goinj^ to upset the
society in which he fintlB himself ^
factory system, will he tell me how he is g'oing to do itP
If
he is going to break up co-ordinated and unified capital, will
he tell me how? If he is going to divide up his units so that
he adopts the Guild idea, will he tell me how much of the
Guild idea he will adopt, and what sort of a social fabric he is
going to create at the end? As a matter of fact, I contend
first of all that Belloc's line of argument is unscientific, because he does not allow for the evolutionary process, the working out of the Socialist idea through time. The words he uses
are mere labels and do not signify reality at all, like the expression Collectivism, as he uses it, on the one hand, and the
expression Servile and Servility, as he uses it, on the other
meaningless.
On the other hand he has not told us where he
himself stands and what cure he proposes to ofier for the
various social evils with which we are faced.
I maintain that
the Socialist idea of Collectivism, of taking what we call
capital
and I use the word because I do not want to confuse
and explain issues I maintain that the Socialist idea that you
must have co-operative production by massed capital, by
massed labour, and then alongside of that that you must create
some system of distribution, which Socialism can do and tells
you how you can do, is the only rational, the only possible, and
the only hopeful way of solving the social difiiculties with
which we are now faced.
—
—
Mr. BELLOC: Every institution is fitted to the nation in
which it arises.
One in the Gallery: Speak up.
Mr. Belloc I shall begin quite differently now. I don't
want to be like a lawyer, but if you will allow me I cannot
:
help being precise. It is my nature.
I affirmed the following
proposition: "That the unreality of the Collectivist ideal is
apparent from the fact that contemporary Collectivist effort is
leading, not to Collectivism, but to the Servile State."
I then
defined this abstraction, the Servile State, in order that my
words might have some meaning. Since I am told that my
definition was nebulous I will repeat it.
The Servile State is
that in which a portion of the community is permanently dispossessed of the means of production and is compelled to labour
and to produce for the advantage, not only of themselves, but
also of those privileged beings who retain the means of
production.
And when I say compelled I do not mean
more or less elbowed into such labour, but compelled
to it by law.
For instance, by Lloyd George's law a man
may pay fourpence a week out of that £9,200,000, week
18
Mr.
BELLOC.
week aud year after year, out of his eio'hteen shillings
a week at tlie docks, but there may come a day when he does
not accept employment under the terms olfered by the Labour
Exchanges, in which case he sacrifices the sum. I think I have
defined myself clearly.
That is the Servile State. I did not
say it was a bad thing. All of us have ancestors who owned
slaves, and all of us have ancestors who were slaves.
There is
no man in this room who, two thousand years ago, had not an
ancestor who owned slaves, or an ancestress, and there is not
a man iti this room wlio had not oiiewho was a slave oraslaveress,
a she-slave.
I do not say tliat the Servile State is a bad thing.
The society in which Greek tragedy arose was a far better society
than Ijiat of modern England, aud if you say " I like a slave
state; I am asking foraslave state," I should say "1 thoroughly
understand you; go ahead. I differ, because 1 am one of the
old guard I believe in God, and so forth but go ahead and
make your slave state and say that everybody shall liave bread
and butter and food, and do not bother too mucli whether the
capitalist class is secure in its predominance so long as the
servile class is secure in its mere sufficiency."
But Mr.
MacDonald did not meet that point. He said I was obscure.
I wish I was.
I will re-define myself as clearly as possible.
I
will begin again. The Servile State is one in which a portion of
the inhabitants of the State, dispossessed of the means of production, are secure in sufficiency, without the dispossession of
the capitalist or means-of-production-owuing class.
Is that
clear? I ask Mr. MacDonald in the clearest way this.
You
have been at it for seventy years. Our Lord if you will pardon me the term I almost said Our Blessed Lord died about
the year 33 or the year 3T.
The Neronian persecution took
place, I think, about a generation later, and about a hundred
years later the thing we now call the Catholic Church was
fully grounded. Where is your Socialism? You have had about
seventy years to Collectivise property.
Are you getting nearer
or farther?
When I was a boy of nineteen and did not know
the world, I went through the gas strike and the great dock
strike of 1889, with John Burns, by the way, incredible as it
may seem. I did not meet him much; I won't pretend to be
a follower of a much more important man than myself; but I
met him once or twice. Though my motives are the same today a-s they were then, I cannot but look back ujiou that time
and say to myself that wo are farth(>r from actual confiscation
are putting water in our wine, and
than we were then.
we are getting contented, and i)art of our cojitent is the putting
of £9,200,000 of direct taxation upon the proletariat of
England. What have you transferred; what have you begun
after
;
;
—
;
We
—
—
;
Mr. BELLOC.
10
—
What
you and
step have you taken, MacDonald
to transfer?
in the direction of transferring the means of production
yours
—
from those who own into the hands of those
individually or collectively ?
who do not own,
Mr. MacDonald Income tax.
Mr. Belloc No. Income tax does not fall upon capital
You have
I own capital, and I own land.
that is the point.
He said he had confisnot touched my capital and mj^ land.
:
:
cated so
much
out of a shilling' of
my
income.
I despair
when
on an economic matter requiring a clear definition and clear
thought a scientific matter a leader of economic thought
comes forward and calls that the confiscation of the means of
production.
You have not advanced one step towards getting
You have in some
the land or towards getting the capital.
cases taken capital by mistake, as in the unfortunate licensBut you
ing clauses of Lloyd George's remarkable Budget.
have not applied it to buying the means of production.
You spend it on salaries to the new people of the BureauIf you were to earmark
cracy that you are creating.
recommend this to him, that he will earmark the death
duties of 1912, that he will move that they be earmarked for
the purchase of the railways that run south of London.
If
he will do that I shall approve, because railways I in common with Justinian, who did not know about railways but
who knew about roads agree in regarding as things normally national.
Then he will at least have transferred the
means of production at any rate, capital from the hands of
private people and put certain means of production by something very like confiscation in the hands of the State.
Now
there has not been a trace of such a policy in any country in
Europe to the present day.
Mr. MacDonald says borrowed
capital will be repaid shortly by the terms of its loan.
He
says we are paying back.
It is true of every individual loan
that it carries a sinking fund, but that shows nothing: the
point is whether the total indebtedness of Communities to
Members of this audience, some few
Capital is rising or no.
of you may have passed through that experience that has coloured the whole of my life, in which you had to borrow, and
I will ask you Is it your own experience that the creditor is
especially kind at the point where his investment begins to be
difficult? Give him an inch
does he not take an ell? When a
man borrows and puts a sinking fund on to his borrowing, if he
is a capable man, still with power, he may ultimately pay
back his private debt.
Many have done so. What are your
Collectivities under the so-called i^ocialist pressure of the
Socialist politicians doing? Why, the debt is increasing and
—
—
—
—
—
—
:
—
It has increased to such a point that now the inbeginning to say: " We won't lend you any more."
your sinking- fund then You borrow money for page-
iiicreasiug'.
vestor
is
Where
is
't
you borro\v money for what Ruskin called "fireworks,"
you borrow money for mistakes in tramlines even those poor
devils of tramlines that have to carry the whole burden of the
You are receivargument, even they sometimes do not pay.
ing 1.8 per cent, at the best; you are paying 3.2 per cent, at
I am talking of what is, not of what might be.
the lowest.
If there were an inhiiite power of borrowing always with a
good investment, you would, of course, at last pay oii, but
do you think the capitalist class is going to allow you to do
that? You are going to take their wealth without fighting,
ants,
—
without initiative? I used the phrase "Heaven help us." I
won't say it would need something more than Heaven, but
You
it would need a great effort on the pait of Heaven.
won't ^^i hold of the means of production save on the barriBut you have not begun to do it even in your legislacades.
tion.
I shall
believe this
argument
of
repayment when
I see
the debt diminishing, but 1 do not. It is increasing, and that
debt, vaguely called Municipal Debt, is owed to somebody.
To whom? To the capitalist, whom, by the way, one may
never attack by name.
One in the Aldience: W^hat about the National Debt?
Mr. Ji):LLOC That is exactly in the same category. When
it is spent on railways, with a sinking fund, it is wisely spent;
when it is spent on fireworks it is unwisely spent, but in every
case it is owed to the capitalist class and is a millstone round
Now I have exhausted twelve or
tbe neck of the producer.
thirteen minutes, and I want Mr. MacDonald in his second
If we are getting towards
reply to get to that precise point.
Let him give me instances of it.
Collectivism, well and good.
But if he says we are not getting towards the Servile State, I
will give him a few instances which will make him think.
The other day the
Take Western Europe as a whole.
The
Kothschilds in France quarrelled with their workmen.
Socialist Press called the Ilothschilds in this connection the
"Compagnie du Nord." They quarrelled with their workmen
I should not say this if they could
over twopence a week.
send me to prison for saying it— I am taking care not to tell
you the whole truth. TIh'V quarrelled with their workmen
over twopence a week. The workmen came out on strike, and
that their right as free
they thought poor innocents
men to work or not to work was an unbreakable weapon.
"We," they said, "hold the means of communication, at
least between one Province of France and the Capital..
:
—
!
—
We
—
Mr. BELLOC.
21
come out, and we must win." Did they? A politician
and a leader of the proletariat and a stron<i' Socialist of the
name of liriand ordered them under pain of death to <i'o
He did not order the Eothschilds under
back and work.
I am not a Socialpain of death to give up that twopence.
ist, but if I had been at that conference and I had been IJriand,
I do not think llothschild would have enjoyed his dinner
again. You see what I mean ? Armed with a human motive,
nerved with a human purpose, you can do something'; with
these German-Jewish abstractions you can do nothing at
What have you Socialists done how far
all.
I ask again
have you proceeded!-' I want Mr. MacDonald to answer
that.
Have we, as a fact, come any nearer to his ideal; have
we not come nearer to the Servile State? In the four minutes
remaining, let me say and I shall only occupy two of them
there is another argument, and I am astouislied that Mr.
MacDonald has not used it. I paid him the compliment of
saying he was Scotch, and upon my soul when I hear him
talking I think he must be from Huntingdonshire, which was,
as this intelligent and well-educated audience knows, for a
long time a Scotch fief. There is an argument, and I wonder he
did not use it. He might have said "Yes, we are working for the
Servile State: but "when we have produced the Servile State
then 5'ou will see we shall have the CoUectivist State as the next
stage." I ask you as a mere matter of human psychology how
the one can lead to the other, and I ask him to take that point.
You may have created a state of society in which, from one
will
—
:
—
generation to another, the minority are used to their confirmaand security in the means of production, with all its
advantages, and a large majority are used to and secure in
what they need for their own little lives, but not to ownership
and not to the responsibility that comes with ownersiiip. "When
you have produced that State, have you produced a national
psychology which will lead to revolt and the taking away of
the means of production from the rich ? Of course not. You
have produced a nation comfortable and used to .servile conThis may be very good. I am not blaming it.
But
ditions.
you have gone right out of the path that leads to collectiv-
tion
ism.
I happen to believe that if propei'ty were well distributed, you would automatically, as is proved to be the case
ever since histoiy began, have arising in the organism of
human society co-operative institutions each safeguarding
But I am not debating
itself against too great competition.
I am telling you that the drift of actual, sothat to-night.
called Socialist legislation is not towards Socialism at all,
but towards this established, confirmed, and secure division
Mr.
22
•
between owners and non-owners, which
danger of modern industrial society.
Mr MacDONALD
MaoDONALD.
1 predicate as the great
I am very sorry that I have to go back
to the Servile State again.
The proposition which Mr. Belloc
is affirming to-night is, as he quoted, "That the unreality of
the Collectivist ideal is apparent from the fact that contemporary Collectivist effort is leading, not to Collectivism, but
I asked him to define what he meant
to the Servile State."
by the Servile State. He says it is a State in which a small
section of the community own the means of production
;
....
Mr. Belloc
Are confirmed
:
in the
ownership of the means
of production.
Mr. MacDoxald
But
they are confirmed in the ownerin which a small section of the
community own the means of production, and if Belloc likes
That is preI will add, and are confii-med in their ownership.
cisely the state of things to-day.
ship, do not they
:
own
it?
if
...
Mr. Belloc
It is really putting my words wrong.
I
added "And those who do not own are confirmed insufficiency
and security under the owners."
:
:
Mr. MacDonald But the Servile State does not require
What
that the slaves should be confirmed in sufficiency.
Belloc means to do is to create something which is very special
to his own ideas and then call that something the Servile
Let us have it.
That is precisely
State; but never mind.
what is happening at the present moment, and it is against that
that the whole of the Collectivist movement is being aimed.
What is happening? How can Mr. Belloc assume that Collectivism and that definition of the Servile State of his are one
and the same thing, when as a matter of fact the whole trend
of modern Colle<tivism is to put an end to the ownership of the
means of production by a small section of the community?
Mr. lioUoc says: "Show me what you are doing for Collectivism." Very well; the question is perfectly simply answered,
but first of all let me ask Belloc whether he precisely understands what kind of contribution Socialism requires at the
present moment.
He miglit have come to me if we had both
been living in 1831 he an old Tory and mj^self, say, a Radical
and he might have come and challenged me with all his
eloquence and with all his falsity of logic, in 1831, and said:
" I challenge you to show me one single step you have taken
towards the extension of the franchise in this country.
You
have been working for it since 1780; this is 1831; that is
:
—
—
—
2a
Uv. MacDONALI).
about 60 vears"— (A voice
:
"Forty years"*)— "and now," he
would say, "after all this agitation, after all this strife, you
Is
are just as far away from it as ever you were before."
there a single piece of finished work about which precisely
the same thing cannot be said ? He turns and he says he was
surprised I did not reply that through the Servile State we are
I did not reply that because I deny
to Collectivism!^
I did as
the reality of his definition of the Servile State.
a matter of fact reply on precisely the lines he said he expected a reply, but which he thought he did not get, when
of
I instanced the writing of the play of the friend in front
Ts^ow beme to my left-hand side (Mr. G. liernard Shaw).
fore you get Collectivism you have got to get a Collectivist
Does Belloc niean
intention and will in the people outside.
not more Collecis
there
moment
present
the
at
that
to say
there
tivist intention, enormously more, in this country than
was when he took part in the great dock strike behind Burns?
Why, nowadays the great difficulty that we have all got to
experience is that you cannot get anybody to stand upon
coming
Everything
theory against Collectivist and Socialist ideas.
that "is done now, whether by reactionary people or by socalled progressive people, is being done upon the assumption
that the community as a whole has got power, has got wealth,
has got responsibility, and ought to take co-operative action.
Confiscation, says Belloc, is further away now than it was
I am glad of it, because if
when he was a boy of nineteen.
Mr. Belloc and the handful of people who associate with him
and share his opinions I differentiate between the handful
of people who share his opinions and the vast number of people
who delight in reading about his opinions, of which I am one
the rapidity
if Belloc imagines that he is going to measure
amount of
the
by
Collectivism
or
Socialism
of
cominu'
the
of
confiscation that is being done, then of course he and I disWe are not going to
agree absolutely and fundamentally.
get to Socialism by confiscation, as he calls it, unless he
—
What
confiscation what I mean by income tax.
did the State do to entitle it to claim from Mr. Belloc the
money that he thought was his own? Absolutely nothing—
from the point of view of the person who believes in confiscaThe State stepped in and said: " Mr. Belloc.
tion, mark you.
your property, your income^ into your
money,
your
you pay
I will confiscate onebank every year to a certain amount.
be, and I take it to
may
case
the
it,
as
of
one-fifth
or
fourth
What is the use of Mr. Belloc using the word conmyself."
means bv
*~MrrBelloc would not have been good at mathematics.
—J.R.M.
;
24
Mr.
MacDONALD.
fiscation if he is not jioiiig- to apply it when it actually takes
placer' That is not all.
The Avhole of our municipal experiments are g'oing on and have been created our parks, our
—
municipal housing schemes, our municipal tramway schemes;
aye, even this scheme of insurance, imperfect as it is and as
we know it is, a scheme of insurance for which a Liberal Gov-
ernment
is responsible, and not a Collectivist Government;
nevertheless, ten years ago that scheme, M'ith all its faults and
all its shortcomings, would have been far too Collectivist for
even a Liberal Government to have brought into operation.
In fact, Belloc's argument narrows itself down to this.
He
says "To-day you have not got Socialism." Well, nobody has
ever said we had.
And when you work it down, analyse the
argument to its contents, and give it an accurate meaning,
that is all it comes to, that after so many years of agitation,
and organisation, and legislation, we have not yet got Socialism.
But why y Because you are in a minority.
Mr. Belloc
does not only want confiscation.
That is a pretty tall order,
and it is a very queer order.
He says he is not a Socialist
his speech shows that, and his criticism of Socialism shows it.
He will have a chance of becoming a Socialist when he ceases
to imagine that Socialism is going to come by confiscation.
But he does not only want confiscation he also wants a
minority to rule the majority, because only under that political condition would it be possible for the Collectivist minority
to-day to show you any j)ure scheme or experiment in Collectivism.
What is happening and what is bound to happen?
It is no use people living in a social vacuum.
W^hat you
:
;
to do is this.
You liave to remember where your
Socialism started, under what conditions it started, and you
have to remember the transforming process, both in its
kind and in its nature, which has to take place before your
Socialist movement can really triumph over the conditions
that it wants to take the place of.
You start from capitalism, the ordinary capitalism, the content of which we all
know perfectly well.
start as a critical organisation,
very crude at first, using absolute expressions, which we by-andby apply under capitalism, not under Socialism, which we byand-by apply in the actual world, not in the ideal world which
we have constructed in our own minds and in the application
of those ideas of ours we are limited, not by ourselves, but by
are limited, not by Socialist opinion, but by opinion
you.
outside, by Mr. Belloc, for instance, who is not a Socialist at
have got to take into account all the possibilities
all.
and only the possibilities which are at our disposal for practical legislative j)urposes, and if when the experiments that
have
We
;
We
We
;
Mr.
MacDONALD.
26
we can conduct
are being made a critic should rise up and
say they are not perfect, well, of course thej^ are not perfect
they are just as much as society will stand, and their imperfections of to-day will be smoothed out by amendments and
changes to-morrow, and there is not a single Socialist with
any common sense who believes in any other method except
that.
Mr. Belloc What about the railways!''
Mr. MacDoxald Well, take the railways. Thirty years
ago the railways were the subject of an enormously entrenched
organisation of private interests.
What has happened? We
have just had a committee reporting, consisting not of Socialthere was only one Labour man
ists, not even of Labour men
on the committee but consisting of railway magnates, capitalists, business men, and that committee has issued a report
which was published three days ago and which foreshadowed
We
in every page railway nationalisation.
Take canals.
have had a canal commission sitting since 1906, with one
Socialist upon it: Chairman, Lord Shuttleworth Lord Farrer
a Member, Sir John Brunner a member, and men of that type.
What has happened? Your committee has reported that you
ought to have an efficient canal service, that you have not ^ot
an efficient canal service, and that if you are going to get an
efficient canal service, you have got to nationalise the whole
service and find the money for it.
These things have got to be
done.
You have got to change public opinion before you can
re-write history and change the social organisation of the
Mr. Belloc
country, and I claim that that is being done.
knows very well I think at any rate he does, sitting as a
Member of Parliament that time after time when we discussed industrial and socialist things the trouble always was
that there was a certain section in the House of Commons
:
:
—
—
;
—
—
calling themselves social reformers who always tried their best
Why? Because they were beginto say as much as we said.
ning to be conscious of the fact that the whole mental outlook
As a matter of fact, we are going
of our people is changing.
through precisely the same revolution, or a revolution of the
same kind, as that to which Belloc referred in his opening
From being
speech as the revolution of the Middle Ages.
individualists M'e are becoming Socialists; socialistic first of
are going to ensure againt unall, and then Socialists.
employment first of all. That is the first step.
Mr. Belloc interjected a remark.
Mr. MacDonald Yes, it may be expensive work, but we
are not living in heaven.
Mr. Belloc No, I said at the expense of the workers.
We
:
:
Mr.
26
MacDONALD.
Mr. MacDonald It may he, but even then that is only a
Buperficial view to take of it.
If I am f^oing to create, even
at the expense of the workers, a system of social responsibility
which will evolve by a law of its own being into a real system
of social responsibility, financed from social sources, and not
used as a burden upon the workers, then I am going to take
and make the beginning that public opinion to-day will allow
me, and when we get into Committee on this Bill we are going
to change some of the Bill.
I venture to say that if this
debate were to take place six moiiths from now instead of to:
night
....
Mr. Belloc I will take
Mr. MacDoxald And I
:
it
on.
be delighted to accept. I
debate had taken place six months from
now instead of to-night you would have found that as a result
of the Labour Party criticism, the Collectivist criticism, both
from the Labour Party and outside the Labour Party, this
scheme that we would then be considering would be far better
moulded in a Collectivist likeness than it is at present.
Of
course, Mr. Belloc can criticise what is known as Socialistic
Liberalism or Social Reform Liberalism. So can 1. So we
all do, and so do the Socialists all round.
But the dift'erenco
between him and myself is this, that he will accept nothing as
Socialism except the finished ])roduct, whereas I say, that that
The problem is Are you going
is not the problem at all.
first of all in the direction of changing public opinion, and
secondly, of applying that changed public opinion to your
social work?
Are you going out in a Socialist direction?' I
maintain that in thirty years the change has been enormous.
No man can close his eyes to the fact that it exists, and consequently so far as Collectivism is concerned my contention is
that first of all it is alien even to Belloc's own definition of
the Servile State, that as a matter of fact his Servile State is
not being created, but that the real fact is that Collectivism is
being steadily applied to transform capitalism and in that
transforming stage, that sort of transition stage, it is bound to
be badly applied, it is bound to be imperfect, it is bound in
some respects to be disappointing, but there beyond the change
Collectivism is coming stronger and stronger and stronger and
will ultimately emerge triumphant.
:
was saying that
will
if this
:
Mr. BELLOC The last five minutes of this type of debate,
which, like silk, is imported from France, hardly ever has to do
with arguments in this country, but with re-stating OTie's
opinions.
The gist of Mr. MacDonald's reply, I think I may
We have not got a Socialist State, but all these
say, was this.
:
Mr BELLOC.
27
various moves towaicls g-iving- the proletariat secuiitj aud not
capital, and the employers security and not confiscation, are
moves towards the Socialist State. That is evolution. I submit, I only submit, that in my philosophj-, and only in my
philosophy and that of the handful of men who agree with me,
there is a difference between south aud north, between dark
aud light, between plus and minus
and if such differences exist, then the whole point of the Servile State is that
it is walking away from the Collectivist State.
You are producing, by things like the Insurance Bill, a state of society in
which England wants to help the poor, in which people feel
kind towards the poor, and in which people are willing to put
£9,200,000 burden of direct taxation on the shoulders of the
poor, but you are emphatically not approaching towards the conMr. MacDonald says he
fiscation of the means of production.
does not want to confiscate the means of production. Tell it to
your children, and to your children's children. He is going
to get the means of production out of the hands of the rich
without confiscation, bj' Parliamentary means, by goodfellowship and practical understanding of men and of human
affairs.
Twice to-night I have used the phrase: "Heaven help
us." I add Heaven help the human intellect if such confused
thought can determine affairs. It is true that you can so
that is quite
affect the gradual economic processes of society
true as to canalise them in this or that direction. It is true
that a great statesman i)ossessed of great powers, perhaps almost of despotic powers, can save society bj- that method.
It is true, and I grant that fully, that you can produce the
Collectivist State in that fashion. You could, by perpetually
taxing income wp to the breaking point, and alwaj's transferring the proceeds to the purchase of the means of production,
begin to produce the Socialist State. But my whole point is
So-called
that there is not a sign of its coming into being.
" Socialistic " legislation takes nineteen to twenty millions
pounds in death duties from the rich in a year, and then, instead of transforming it into nationally-owned land or capital,
pays it away in salaries to the hungry people who hang upon
the party system and upon their subordinates the politicians
Ihireaucrats are very useful, but they
pay it to bureaucrats.
Why does not Mr.
are not the means of production.
MacDonald move (what I am perfectly prepared to move) whenever in the House of Commons j'ou can move anything, and he
^the earmarking of the
is a leader of a party and can do it
death duties for the purpose of purchasing the railways? Why
;
:
—
—
:
—
not?
One
in
the Audience
:
It
would cost eleven millions.
28
Mr.
BELLOC
Mr. Belloc: Why do they call it Collectivisiu or the
national ownership of the means of production to take
this
money and spend it on salaries? Obviously it is not. Now
there is another point which is well worth einphasisino.
Mr
MacDonald appeals to what is of real value in this^ debate,'
namely, experience m the House of Commons.
I had five
years of it.
T left ii voluntarily, and if I return it
will be
more voluntarily still. He tells me that I had experience,
sitting there as a Radical, that the trouble was to
prevent reactionary people from stopping this flood of modern Socialist
feeling.
It was nothing of the sort.
Mr. MacDonald I did not say that. I said expressing
themselves, that when reactionary people wanted to fight u's
they expressed themselves in the language we used
:
Mr. Belloc I am to blame, and Mr. MacDonald is quile
The. trouble was, as one may say familiarly, to pin
them down.
They always used our terminology, they admitted the existence of land, and they were good enough to say
that machinery was to be discovered in this world.
Do you
know what it is impossible to get through the House' of
Commons? I will tell you, and with that I shall sit down.
You may think it has nothing to do with this debate, but f
have only two minutes, and not even that by rights, in wliich to
tell you the following anecdote.
If you think it does not apply
to the debate, then you are of a different lineage
and atavism
from myself. A law was proposed by Mr. Herbert Gladstone,
now Lord Gladstone that great name is now dignified with a
peerage and that law is now being administered by that son
of the people Mr. Winston Churchill, and that other
independent
democrat Mr. Masterman, and what does that law say? That
law says that any man guilty three times of petty "larceny,
stealing a pocket hundkerchief, poaching, getting a few eggs
out of a ne.st, after the full and maximum sentence which the
law allows him, may be kept in prison for five years apart from
the company of all human beings and apart from human
speech, and womenfolk— in Hell— to teach him not to steal
pocket handkerchiefs and birds' ne.sts.
The first man who waa
sent to do these extra five years was a man who stole an
indiarubber mat.
The mat was worth three-and-aix.
You talk
about the Meakening of the old defence of ])roperty you talk
of the advance of Socialist ideas which denies the right
to such
monopolies.
lUit which of you opposed that law?*" I fought
:
right.
—
—
;
it
in the
House
of
Commons — God remember
last
diiy— tooth and
five
years— but when
it for me at the
got an indefinite sentence down to
came to dividing against that infamous
n:nl.
it
I
Mr.
MacDONALD.
stinks in the nostrils of what is left of ChristenI could get no one in
that infamous thingof Commons to "tell" with me. That is the House
tiling", wliicli
dom
in
Europe
the House
of
29
—
—
Commons.
Mr.
MacDONALD
:
I
want
to
begin where Belloc ended,
picture he has given of the House of
inaccurate and altogether a caricature.
The
Commons is
absolutely
Mr. Belloc: Who "told" with me on that question?
Mr. MacDonald The question that he has raised finally
is one which cannot be dealt with in live minutes, but the
theory of detention which was embodied in that Bill ....
Mr. Belloc For attacks on property.
Mr. MacDonald My friend's back was turned to me and
his voice was thrown so much up that I could not hear his
:
:
:
elaborated the case of the man
The man
am clear about.
As a
who stole the mat did not begin by stealing that mat.
matter of fact the theory that was contained in that Bill which
was described so delightfully by Belloc is a theory which beyond everything is a Collectivist theory.
The trouble is that
fijst of all it is said by Belloc that Collectivism is coming unwillingly to the Servile State and by some of his friends
behind and when I say that this Bill embodied Collectivist
theories about punishment he says: "Of course it is, because
Collectivism is servility."
Well, they cannot have it both
ways. But this is only an aside.
The fact of the matter is
that if Belloc had raised the point earlier and not in the last
five minutes, it could be shown that this Bill, as a matter of
fact, does embody a very sound idea.
It may be abused, undoubtedly, as Socialism can be abused, as everything that
applies to our complicated state of society in a general way
can be abused, because we are getting further and further
away from the time when our legislation can be so precise
that a man with some imagination can never caricature it at
all and imagine circumstances under which its applicatiia
would be absolutely absurd. I do not want you to believe for
a moment that the picture of tlie House of Commons, given
by Mr. Belloc, is at all a reliable one.
Equally unreliable is
his statement about what Collectivism is doing.
His definition is finally that what we are doing is that we are not providing the proletariat with its own capital, but we are only
giving it security.
As a matter of fact, the Collectivist idea,
and the Collectivist impulse, and the Collectivist demand,
which can only be effective when there is a Collectivist
majority behind it, is to give the proletariat the capital which
final point, but I
who stole a mat.
—
understood
That
is
it
all I
—
Mr MacDONALD.
30
it to make a living.
It is
in a Collectivist sense, in a co-operative
form, but nevertheless, each individual in the community
vill have his capital and not merely his security.
But llere
was a light that Belloc threw upon his position, which h:^ hnd
is
necessary in order to enable
going to be given
it before, bj' an aside phrase.
He seems to
assume that if we improve the condition of the people, give
them what he calls security, then j'ou are somehow or other
reducing the revolutionary capacity. That is altogether wrong.
The fact of the matter is that if you keep your people down in
slums you are just supplying the instruments for the hands
of the vilest form of reaction in this country.
Belloc's experience and mine have been rather diverse, even under the
same circumstances apparently, but I think it has been the
same in this respect.
Everyone who has fought a constitu-
not thrown upon
ency, who has propagated Socialism in the midst of the poorest section of the community, knows that that section is so
low down that it has ceased to have any ideals.
You can
parade your armies of unemployed men in the streets and talk
grandiloquently about confiscation and so on, but it amounts
to nothing.
The 'hing that you have got to organise is the
intelligent, thinking man and woman, who have got the
capacity to imagine a better state of things, and if by your
Insurance schemes, and by your various other steps that Belloc
describes as being- mere steps to give more security, you can
give men more of the security which means more calmness
of mind, which enables them to see clearer the social conditions under which they live, then I say those secure people
will be far quicker to come and give us our majority which
we want before we can realise the Socialism that Belloc wants
to see realised whilst we are in a minority
and so on that
want to make
fundamental point I join issue with him.
we
the people more secure and to give them more leisure
want to give them better goods we want them to talk less
about confiscation, becaiise my experience of the man who
does that is, that he is a man who is prepared to confiscate
even the possessions of his own comrades and to go over to
the other side.
!My idea of Socialism and it is the Collectivist idea
is that Socialism is going to come through betterment, not througli worsemeiit that we are going up steadily
and uninterruptedly to Socialism, not down and then up with
a jump
a most absurd though a very delightful idea.
;
We
;
;
—
—
—
—
One
in
the Audience: "What about John Brown?
Mr. MacDon.m-I) The problem of John l^rown is still an
open problem, and ])erhaps my friend in the audience will go
:
Mr.
MaoDONALD
31
home quietly and discuss it iu tlie light of more recent enquiries and investigations into tlie effect of the John Brown
rising.
However, we will leave that on one side. The final
point is Belloc's idea of confiscation.
He says:
don't
you earmark the £19,000,000 taken in Death Duties 'for the
purpose of what he calls confiscating the railways." I thought
there was no programme but the programme of confiscation for
Belloc.
He wants me to go to the House of Commons next
week, when railway stock is high, and jjut down a resolution
that the £19,0('0,000 ought to be set aside for buying out the
railways.
What would happen? At the end of the week
railway stock would be so liigh that your nineteen millions
would not nearly touch it. I will tell you what we w-ill do
"Why
about railway stock.
Mr. Belloc
:
This
is
worth hearing.
Mr. MacDoxald We will continue the process that we
have begun and we will depress the exploiting value of railway stock by imposing taxation upon railway incomes, and
then when the time suits us and when you are ready we will
consider both taxation and purchase, butnotone single moment
before the time is ready and before the time is ripe, and that
is not now.
:
Mr. Bfxloc
:
No, and
it
never will be.
We
Mr. MacDoxald It is all very well to say that.
are
here on a serious debate.
If it is a question of smart reply
then we can say to-morrow it will happen, but as serious politicians and as people who want to do something and not merely
to talk grandiloquently, you know very well that if the proposition that Belloc advances as a serious contribution to the
expenditure of public income and to the nationalisation of railways was taken up by us now it would lead to absolute disaster
from both points of view, but that before we are ready for that
step to be taken we have to take certain preliminaries, and I
can assure you we are doing it. Therefore, again I want to
You have got to
come back to the fundamental position.
You have got to
criticise Collectivism as a growing concern.
criticise it as a dynamic proposition and not merely as a static
one, and it is because lielloc has emphasised it as a static
one ....
:
Mr. Belloc
:
No.
And not as a dynamic one that he has
of all confused its present operations with the Servile
State, and secondly declined to see that in the change of public
Mr. MacDoxald
first
:
Mr MacDONALD.
^2
opinion and in the new mass of public experience a steadilygrowing Collectivism will at last dominate the whole state of
which we live.
Mr. Belloc It is my very
society in
plea^sant duty to move a vote
customary, to the Chair. There is only one
original way of doing it, and I have done it myself at least a
hundred times, and that is to say that the functions of a
Chairman are the most unpleasing of those that anyone can
undertake at a great meeting.
It is perfectly true.
He is
quite close to the speakers, he hears the thing iu full blast, he
is not allowed to" say what he thinks, and if there is a row he
is concerned.
Therefore, I move a vote of thanks to the
:
of thanks, as is
Chairman.
Mr. MacDonald I would like io be allowed to second
that motion.
I hope the Chairman never trembled iu his shoes
during the whole of the evening, and I hope he will be able to
give both Belloc and myself a testimony of good behaviour in
spite of the way in which we have been going hammer and
:
tongs at each other.
The resolution was carried by acclamation.
The Chairman I have just to thank you for passing that
vote of thanks and to say that I think we have had the most
glorious evening; and I hope we shall all l)e present six mouths
:
hence to hear the end of this dialectical battle.
The proceedings then terminated.
BOOKS BY
RAMSAY MacDOHALD
Mr. J.
THE SOCIALIST LIBRARY. VoL
and largely re-written.
Cloth, 1/6 net: Paper,
In this volume Socinlism
and
is
disflociated
(Sixth Edition.)
AND SOCIETY.
SOCIALISM
llevised
II.
.
is
from German
l/-
net.
explained in terms of Darwiniam,
philosophy.
CONTENTS :The Problem. Society and the Individual. The Economic Period.
Utopian and Semi-Scientific Socialism. Towards Socialism. Socialism and the Political Organ.
THE SOCIALIST LIBRARY.
VoL
VIII.
SOCIALISM AND GOVERNMENT.
Published In
Two
Parts.
Part
I.
and
Part
II..
I. or Part II., in Paper, 1/3; In Cloth. I/V post tnt.
in Paper, 2/4; in Cloth, 3/4. post free.
This book covers ground which has hitherto been shunned in
this country at any rate by Socialist apologists, and it will doubtless give rise to considerable controversy in the Socialist camp
owing to its independent views on some of the subjects dealt with.
The National Labour Press, Ltd.; 30. Blackfriars Street, Manchester:
and at London and Birmingham.
THE FOLLOWING BRANCHES OF THE
Independent Labour Party
ARE
IN ITS
South West London Federation Area.
Bermondsey, Camberwell, Dulwich, Southwark. North Lambeth, Kennington, Brixton,
Battersea, Clapham, Balham, Streatham,
Tooting, and Wandsworth.
PARTICULARS of existing, and information as to how to form
new, Branches may be obtained from the Hon. Federation SecreInformation as to I.L.P.'s
tary, 61, Sidney Road, Stockwell, S.W.
in other parts of London may be obtained from Mr. James Mylles,
and of the I.L.P. generally
23, Bride Lane, Fleet Street, E.G.
from Mr Francis Johnson, of the latter address.
;
V
SYMPATHIZERS SHOULD JOIN THE PARTY.
UNIVERSITY OF B.C LIBRARY
3 9424 02240 8253
University of British Columbia Library
DUE DATE
MAY
8 1377
MAY 9
PEP
1977 RETI
61979
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